Murnau's film was an unauthorized film adaptation
of Stoker's Dracula with
Max Schreck in the title role as the screen's first vampire - a
mysterious aristocrat living in distant Bremen named Count Graf
Orlok.

In this vampire horror film's most dramatic sequence,
the emaciated, balding undead vampire's image was unforgettable
with a devil-rat face, pointy ears, elongated fingers, sunken cheeks,
and two long toothy fangs.

He was seen first at a distance, but
then quickly approached (through dissolves) toward the horrified
visiting Bremen real estate agent Johannes Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim)
until he was completely in the curved, pointed doorway with a Gothic
arch, revealing his ugly, scary figure.

Sherlock, Jr. (1924)

d. Buster Keaton
Film Editor: Buster Keaton (uncredited)

Stone-faced director/producer Buster Keaton starred as a lovelorn film projectionist named Sherlock Jr. who wanted to be a detective, in this marvelously inventive, silent film comic fantasy.

There was a series of quick, jump-cutting film edits
and an abruptly-changing montage of scenes behind him when he fell
asleep in the projection booth and a ghostly dream version of himself
left his body and walked around the theatre (unnoticed) and then
stepped into the 'silver screen' and magically became part of the
projected shifting scenes, a 'movie in a movie.'

He walked down stairs
and fell over a garden bench or pedestal, found himself on a busy
street, a mountainous precipice, a lion's den, a desert in the middle
of tracks with an approaching train, and a rock surrounded by the
ocean where he dove headfirst into a snowbank, and then returned
to the opening garden where again he fell over the garden bench.

Battleship Potemkin (1925, USSR)

d. Sergei Eisenstein
Film Editor: Sergei Eisenstein (uncredited)

Legendary Russian auteur director Sergei
Eisenstein's classic landmark and visionary film was released in
the US in 1926, advancing the art of cinematic storytelling with
the technique of montage (or
film editing).

Its most celebrated film scene, with superb editing
combining wide, newsreel-like sequences inter-cut with close-ups
of harrowing details to increase tension, was the Odessa Steps
episode. The scene was based upon the incident in 1905 when civilians
and rioters were ruthlessly massacred.

It was beautifully orchestrated
with a montage of close-ups of faces and objects and long-shots,
all rapidly cut together and contrasted as the images built to
a devastating conclusion. In the scene (with 155 separate shots
in less than five minutes), successive waves of white-uniformed
soldiers appeared, ordered by city officials loyal to the czar
to attack the riled-up citizenry.

Shots rang out as they fired
on the civilians, bringing about dizzying chaos as terrified people
rushed to flee down the steep stairs. One woman, whose son had
been shot, cradled his bloodied body in her arms and approached
the army to defy them. She stood in their elongated shadows before
she too was gunned down point-blank.

A young mother was hit in
the mid-section, and the force of her falling body caused her baby
carriage to tumble out of control down the steps, in an indelible
image (copied by Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and
by Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985)).

And in a startling close-up, the lens of a woman's
glasses splintered and blood gushed from her eye socket.

October (Oktyabr) / Ten Days That Shook the World (1928, USSR)

d. Sergei Eisenstein

This film re-enacted in documentary-style, the days
surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution, to commemorate the event's
10th anniversary.

Its most famous sequence was a series of shots
of the pre-Lenin (pre-revolutionary) provisional government leader
George Kerensky climbing a series of stairs - his ascent to power,
interspersed with titles and images that ridiculed his presumptive
grandeur (a mechanical peacock preening itself).

Another sequence
was an 'intellectual montage' of images of various world's religions'
deities, juxtaposed with a baroque image of Jesus.

Blackmail (1929, UK)

d. Alfred Hitchcock
Film Editor: Emile de Ruelle

Hitchcock's film was the first British all-talkie
feature film, although it was originally made as a silent picture
and then converted through dubbing.

In the opening fast-paced sequence
of this thriller, a crook was arrested in his room, fingerprinted,
and jailed by the police (with the passage of time indicated by
cigarette butts in an ashtray).

Hitchcock also used visuals to
subjectively imply other things -- a young, guilt-ridden murderess
Alice White (Anny Ondra) killed overzealous admirer Mr. Crewe (Cyril
Ritchard) with a large bread knife when he sexually assaulted her
in his attic artist's studio. Afterwards, she saw a neon sign advertising
Gordon's Gin cocktail mix being shaken up, but she interpreted
it as the up-down stabbing motion of a thrusting knife.

And the
film contained the first example of a "jump cut" or "shock
cut" when Alice's scream merged with the landlady's discovery
of the body.

Later, the film innovatively
used sound to heighten the tension in the famed family breakfast
scene. The word "knife" was
repeated and amplified in the gossipy conversation about the murder,
heard from Alice's rattled point of view:

What an awful way
to kill a man - with a knife...No, knives is
not right. Now mind you, a knife is a difficult thing
to handle. Not just any knife will do...a knife...and
with a knife... knife...knife...knife...knife.

When Alice picked up the knife to slice bread, the
word knife was
amplified into a loud scream, causing the knife to leap from her
hands, with her father cautioning: "You might have cut somebody
with that."

Un Chien Andalou (1929, Fr.)

d. Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali
Film Editor: Luis Bunuel

This shocking, and provocative surrealistic film
of the 1920s avant-garde movement, only 17 minutes long, was filled
with irrational, freely-associated and shocking images without
any sense of logical continuity or narrative.

It was banned in
various countries, mostly for its infamous eyeball razor-slashing
scene in the opening.

After a title card reading: "Once
upon a time," a middle-aged "husband" (Luis Buñuel)
sharpened his razor and then held his "wife" (Simone Mareuil)
as he slit her eye with the cutting instrument. [Note: a dead calf's
eye was cut in the scene.] The sequence was intercut with shots,
viewed from the balcony, of the full moon as it was sliced or bisected
by clouds.